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Le Parkour in Australia - inaugural workshops
9th annual
STAMPING GROUND DANCE FESTIVAL 2005


Subject: Le Parkour - Report on Le Parkour training workshops at Stamping Ground 2005
Date: Saturday, 15 January 2005 11:49 PM
From: Tony Wolf

Between January 5-9 2005, the Stamping Ground dance and action arts festival in Bellingen, NSW, Australia was host to Australasia's first ever Parkour summer school workshop. The event was arranged by yours truly and this is a quick rundown and review from my POV as the organiser and de facto main tutor for the workshop (more on that to follow). For those who haven't yet caught the buzz, Parkour (also known as PK or FreeRunning) is a French movement discipline of freestyle urban gymnastics. The aim of parkour is to be able to navigate complex environments (city streets, rooftops, forests, etc.) with skill, courage and grace, using obstacles as springboards for acrobatic feats and stunts. It all started in early-mid '04 when I decided that I wanted to do something practical to help the (then fledgling) PK OZ/NZ scene. I had been teaching various skills (stunt fighting, pro-wrestling, martial arts etc.) at Stamping Ground events for a number of years and had a good working relationship with the SG organiser, Peter Stock. Peter is a very open-minded guy and he was willing to take a risk by supporting a workshop in a subject that virtually no-one had ever heard of. By way of background, Stamping Ground is an open-access workshop festival which typically attracts up to eight hundred dancers, circus artists, actors and athletes for two weeks of high-intensity classes in up to forty different movement skills. Subjects range from martial arts to acrobatics and many different styles of dance performance. The festival takes place in Bellingen, a beautiful small town along the banks of the Bellinger River, and features numerous performances as well as the ten day long workshop schedule. From the beginning I had wanted to encourage the PK OZ/NZ community to play an active role in developing the workshop structure. Most major decisions were run through the Oz/NZ Forum for feedback, including curriculum plans, invitations for promo. pictures, etc. Peter Stock responded by creating a dedicated PK page on his SG website and we were in business. He also went above and beyond the call of duty by touring around the Bellingen township with a digital camera and posting about thirty pix of potential PK sites to help with our planning. The big advantage in attaching the PK workshop to an established event such as the Stamping Ground festival was that almost all of the logistics were already in place. With accommodation, communications, financial management, etc. sorted out for us we could focus on designing a training programme. However, there were still three major challenges that had to be faced. The first was how to promote a training workshop to the general PK community when that idea is not yet established in the scene, and also how to promote the workshop itself to SG participants who had never heard of Parkour. Since the Oz/NZ Forum is the major communications venue for the local scene(s), I continued to post updates and to promote the event there, as well as on the General Topics forum on the off-chance that any international traceurs might be in the area. Aside from the Parkour page on the Stamping Ground website, it was decided to promote the course several days ahead of the starting time by screening the "Jump London" Parkour documentary at a gathering of all SG participants to whet their appetities. The second challenge was that PK, as an outdoor activity, was dependent on local architecture and weather conditions. There were a couple of wet-weather options in the form of covered playgrounds and we had free use of a large hall for training, but although the hall came equipped with gym mats it was otherwise a pretty bare space. This problem was solved by the weather itself, which was fantastic on all five days, and by the backup plan involving the creative use of long bamboo poles, tables, etc. to create obstacles for indoor training. The third challenge was that because PK is still a new activity in Oz and NZ, there were no professional tutors who could be called in to run the instructional part of the course. I had originally intended to take a hands-off approach to running the course, focussing on safety and logistics and supervising a team of volunteer tutors from around Oz and NZ. Months before we had set up an email list for a group of eight volunteer tutors, all older traceurs (in their late teens and early 20s) with some related teaching or coaching experience in martial arts and similar areas. Unfortunately, in the weeks leading up to the event all of the volunteers with the exception of El Toro (Josh Woolf) had to pull out due to injuries or work commitments. Compounding this problem was the fact that, although we had just enough participants coming in from the Oz/NZ PK community to justify the "Experienced level" course, there were very few enrollments for the basic programme and in fact the whole PK course came very close to being cancelled at that stage. We gambled on the assumption that there would be ample interest in Parkour once the SG participants had seen Jump London and we were able to go ahead with a modified version of the course, running for ten rather than twenty hours and combining the Basic and Experienced levels together into a single group. Although not ideal from a teaching point of view I felt that this compromise was necessary to establish the course for future events. The PK course effectively began when we screened Jump London for a hugely enthusiastic group of dancers, acrobats and other SG attendees, on the big screen in the Bellingen Memorial Hall which serves as the main gathering point for the SG event. Sure enough, straight afterwards the main street of Bellingen was filled with first-time traceurs mimicking what they had seen in the doco. Two days later we had our first training session, with a hardcore group of traceurs from Melbourne and one from far-away Perth joining myself and El Toro from NZ and MadKat from Chicago. This first training session attracted about twenty-five novice participants, mostly in their late teens but ranging in age from ten to early 60s (!), with slightly more males than females. Prior training levels ranged from zero to professional dancers and dance teachers, skilled acrobats and capoeira artists, etc. We began the first session with a quick rundown of PK history, discussion on the importance of figures such as George Hebert, Don Jean Habrey, Seb Foucan and David Belle as well as discussing the modern scene (UFF networking, etc.) Then, working both inside on the mats for basic roll training and jumping skills, and outside on rails for the fundamentals of vaulting and balancing, we covered some of the basic elements of PK. We also established a format of warm-up and warm-down games and exercises which were to be repeated on each day of the workshop. On day 2 we shifted venues to the outskirts of a large sports field. This was probably our biggest day in terms of participant numbers with about thirty-five people being involved in the training, some having to leave and others joining half-way through the session because of scheduling conflicts with other classes. Again, the fundamentals of rolling and jumping formed the basis is the training, and we introduced some slightly more advanced material in the forms of jumps from heights, vaulting, cat-balances on rails, basic wall-running, etc. Day 3 saw something of a shift in emphasis as we began to look more deeply into what we called the "Parkour body". This was not just muscular development, etc. but rather the traceur's (Parkour practitioner's) use of efficient biomechanics, breathing techniques, form, skeletal structure, momentum, the concept of "softening" the body to conform to different obstacles, skills and PK feats, etc. We also experimented with the idea of "seeing" new possibilities and ways of using the objects in our environments, starting off with very simple objects such as park benches and finding out how many ways they could be navigated. I think that as a group we must have come up with about 40 ways to get over a single bench. The "PK body" and "seeing" exercises that we developed formed the basis for the remainder of the course, as the basic skills started to become second nature and participants became more confident in their ability to improvise their own short runs. Day 4 was largely an open jam session and we discovered a new venue, the local high school, which offered some great PK training possibilities. On Day 5 we prepared for our public show, to be performed that night as part of the "Burnin' Up the Tallowood" spectacular which features performances from most of the groups training at SG. The Melbourne crew had the great idea of incorporating a video into the live show, using footage shot during the week by NiceLanding and edited by MadKat. Our performance began with the three-minute video, nicknamed "Jump Bellingen", being shown on the big screen to an audience of about four hundred people. As the video came an end with a shot of the traceurs making their way towards the hall, the lights came up and suddenly the hall itself was filled with flying bodies vaulting, rolling and leaping over tables and bamboo poles to the accompaniment of a new-skool breakdance beat. The show was a huge success and undoubtedly secured the place of Parkour in the SG line-up for years to come. In all, the SG PK summer school was a highly successful event and I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who helped to make it happen; especially Peter Stock, the Melbourne PK crew, El Toro, MadKat and the people who contributed advice both through the Oz/NZ Forum and on the tutors mailing list. Looking forward to seeing you at SG PK '06 Artful Dodger (Tony Wolf)

JUMP BELLINGEN video stills filmed between 5th & 10th Jan 05 by NiceLanding and edited by MadKat pics - stamping '05 > MAIN MENU > PARKOUR PAGE > pics of some parkour sites in bellingen

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